PTC 5 - Day 1

05:12:00
Ramona Dragomir
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It was about time for snooker to return to the big Sheffield arena, and what a better way to do this but to start a new PTC event, this time, the number five. Don’t want to start this article on a negative note, but I can’t just pass the facts that the World Snooker drawsheet is a total mess, that the dates for the matches are (most of them) wrong, and that the LIVE scoring system was down for the most part of the day. It was really frustrating to see so less concern for the dates. I don’t know what happened but it sure doesn’t look good for the business.Still, with its ups and downs we do enjoy snooker every time we get the chance to see it, and when we don’t are given that chance then at least a proper LIVE scoring system must be up and running and all the details for the matches must be put in order. Ok, that’s it on this subject....let’s focus on the matches! ;-)

Aditya Mehta made a strong start

As usual, the pre-qualifying and qualifying rounds were held one day earlier, so on October 7 among those who made it to the actual competition, these names appeared: Ben Harrison, who defeated Chris Norbury 4-1, the Chinese Tian Pengfei, who defeated Marvin Lim by the same scoreline, Aditya Mehta who won 4-2 over Ian Glover, Martin O’Donnell, who won over Michell Mann with a 4-1 scoreline, the prodigy Luca Brecel, who beat Ian Burns 4-2 and the Chinese who put quite a show during last week EPTC 2 Chen Zhe, who crashed Stephen Groves 4-0.

Yesterday, the battle for the first round of the PTC 5 tournament started fair and square.Rory McLeod made a beautiful start, as he passed 4-3 over the Thai Thanawat Thirapongpaiboon (haven’t you missed one of the guys with the longest name in history of snooker? for I know I did :-P) and 4-2 over China’s Tiang Pengfei.

Ricky Walden, the quarter-finalist from the EPTC 2 event won both matches by the same scoreline (4-1), the first played against Jak Jones and the second against Joe Jorgia, Marcus Campbell beat Kishan Hirani 4-1 and Adam Wicheard 4-2 and Martin Gould continued his great performance of winning every match, whitewashing Joe Delaney 4-0 and beating the Thai Noppon Saengkham 4-1.

Gerard Green booked himself a nice place into the next round by winning 4-1 to Nick Jennings and crashing Joe Perry 4-0 and "The Welsh Potting Machine", Mark Williams ended Mark Miller’s road towards victory with an crushing 4-0 score and closed 4-1 the match against Issara Kachaiwong.“The Jamie’s” boys both secured themselves a new round of great snooker, Jones winning 4-1 over Patrick Eisle and 4-0 over Liu Song and Cope by beating Tommy Ang 4-1 and Belgium’s favorite Bjorn Haneveer 4-3.

"The Jamie`s" boys booked themselves a place into the next round

Less fortunate were the youngster Jack Lisowski who won his first match against China’s "Mighty Mouse" Anda Zhang (4-1), but lost in a very tight battle against Liang Wenbo (4-3) but also Kurt Maflin who succeeded a wonderful victory over the Irish Fergal O’Brien (4-3), but ended by losing 4-2 to the Indian Aditya Mehta. Aditya who by the way, made a very big "wow" debut as he hammered Stephen Maguire 4-0.The winner of the PTC 4 event, Barry Pinches left the competition in its earliest stage, by losing his first match to Ben Harrison 4-1, the runner up from the recent EPTC 2 event Matthew Couch was to be shown also the exist door, as he got crashed 4-0 by the Chinese Xiao Guodong and the Brazilian Igor Figueiredo lost 4-0 to Issara Kachaiwong.

A lot of inconsistency in this first round but also if we are to put together the second European event and this Players Tour Championship. Many players who reached the final stages of the last event found themselves leaving the PTC too early. A lot of great names lost unexpectedly. Still some of the guys that were on top last week showed to be at their best this current week too.

Unfortunately, no century breaks were announced yesterday, as the scoring system was down and no one updated the scores per each frame. I will however make an update to this page once the latest scores will be released.Here you can check the general scores.

Today, the big names will join us, so fingers crossed for your favorite players and see you tomorrow for some gossip! :-P